Norwich, CT - The Slater Memorial Museum was recently featured in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review because of its loans to the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art. In addition, the Slater anticipates equal recognition in California when it loans it 120-year-old full-scale plaster cast of The Dying Gaul. The Carnegie’s exhibition, entitled On A Grand Scale, opens September 28 and commemorates that museum’s centennial anniversary of its remarkable cast collection.

In his September 16 article, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Art Critic Kurt Shaw says “Carnegie first came upon the idea of creating a great hall of architectural casts after touring (on May 2, 1891) the Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich, Conn., with that museum's curator, Henry Watson Kent. The Slater collection, which opened in 1888, features Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, Roman and Italian Renaissance pieces and even today is one of the three largest U.S. cast collections.

Carnegie was so impressed with Kent and the collection that he asked Kent to be an adviser on the project. One section of the exhibition details this connection. Included is one of Kent's original sketchbooks from a European expedition, as well as a log book from the opening of the Slater Memorial Museum that is signed by artists Theodore (sic) Twachtman and Augustus St. Gaudens, and Isabella Stuart Gardner, the influential American art collector, philanthropist and patron of the arts whose collection is now housed in the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston.”

In fact, Slater’s Kent went on to assist at least seven other museums, including the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum in Springfield in acquiring and installing their cast collections.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California will be borrowing the Slater’s copy of the Dying Gaul, cast at the studio of Leopoldo Malpieri in Rome in 1887. The Getty’s exhibition, entitled The Color of Life, opens March 6, 2008 and will focus on “polychrome sculpture. This was the ancient phenomenon of painting stone sculpture with flesh tones and details such as hair color, whites of eyes and colored irises, red lips and bloody wounds. Even the figures of the Parthenon, copies of which are included in the Slater collection, on the Acropolis in Athens was polychomed.

The Slater’s Dying Gaul is a plaster cast of a Roman marble, copied from a Greek bronze around 230 BCE. The statue depicts warrior, struggling against death, with classic naturalism. The figure is nude with the exception of a neck torc, an early, heavy bronze necklace. This may be a reference to historical accounts of Celts fighting nude or only with shields they carried into battle. The Dying Gaul, discovered in the 17^th century during excavations for the construction of the Ludovisi Palace, was both celebrated and used as a model for copies as well as drawings, engravings and paintings.

The Slater Memorial Museum and Converse Art Gallery are part of the Norwich Free Academy, 108 Crescent Street, Norwich 06360. Housed in an exemplary Romanesque Revival building (1886), the museum features full scale plaster casts of Egyptian, Archaic, Greek, Roman and Renaissance sculpture; 17th – 20th c. Americana representing 300 years of Norwich history, fine and decorative Art, Native American artifacts; Asian, African, Oceanic, Egyptian, and European art and ethnographic material. The Converse Art Gallery’s annual series of exhibitions features the work of Connecticut artists. Open year round. Tues – Fri, 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Sat/Sun 1 – 4:00 p.m. Please call 860-887-2506 for directions and general information. Visit : www.norwichfreeacademy.com/